Will Boast's standout memoir Epilogue is about the death of his mother, father, and brother. Both a wrenching exploration of grief and a moving story of remembrance, it's a must-read. Boast shares five rules for writing memoirs.

As I suspect many writers do, I took the long way round to writing a memoir. It took me nearly three years of trying to cram my subject matter into a novel manuscript before I understood that the story I wanted to tell would fit better into nonfiction. When I finally I came to the memoir form, I had only a vague notion of how such a book might be put together. It took me another five years to finish the manuscript that became Epilogue. As provisional and context-specific as they may be, here are a few lessons I learned along the way:

1. If fiction is the art of invention, memoir is the art of selection and arrangement.
For whatever reasons, many readers and writers believe that writing a memoir is easier than writing a novel. It’s all happened already, the thinking seems to go, so all you have to do is put it on the page. If only! As I once heard Joyce Carol Oates remark, beginning a memoir is like having a dump truck pull up beside you and tip a couple tons of garbage on your head. Writing about your own life or family, everything suddenly seems relevant, from the most dramatic events to the smallest ephemera. I know I’m not the only writer to have drafted hundreds more pages than I needed, writing out whole episodes—many of them revealing, earth-shaking, of the utmost vital importance, etc.—that I would eventually just cut, realizing that they didn’t add to the narrative emerging from the morass of pages I was accumulating. I think it took me a year, at least, before I stopped suffocating under all the stuff that goes into memoir and started to find, among the debris, the struts and beams that would form the structure of a story.

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